Hello friends! Today i am filled with gratitude because Creative Capital awarded me one of their 53 State of the Art Prizes. My proposed project is a kids’ graphic novel, a grandmother-granddaughter heist that features the Cherokee language. I’m hoping to use the money to get some help with research, and to run a few comics workshops in the Cherokee Nation in Northeastern Oklahoma, where I am from.
My grandmother spoke Cherokee as much as English when she was a child. My mother knew enough words to chat with my grandmother without me knowing what they were talking about. But I’m pretty bad at learning languages, and at the time it wasn’t a language you could learn in the public school system, so it never stuck well with me. Recently, I’ve been taking online courses offered by Cherokee Nation so I can finally learn.
One of my favorite ways to remember words and phrases is to draw pictures to go along with them. I also like learning enough sentences that I can adapt a scene, or sometimes invent a scene, of a favorite TV show.
You can read more about the State of the Art Prize here. This is the first year for this prize, which spreads money for artists and art projects more evenly across all the states and territories of the USA.
Rachel Elliott 